"The question that forms the title of this article has recently been posted on the Super User Q&A site for computer enthusiasts. At first I was shocked at how silly a question it was as everyone should know that, right? But then I started to think about it and realized anyone under a certain age probably has no clue."

At work, I practically live in Emacs. It handles UNC paths beautifully, but when I spawn a shell to run a couple of svn commands, I get:

'\\foo\bar\baz\wombat'
CMD.EXE was started with the above path as the current directory.
UNC paths are not supported. Defaulting to Windows directory.
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows>_

Also, WINE does not support UNC paths at all, AFAIK. This is obviously not Microsoft's fault, but still a pretty bad situation.